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NVIDIA launches mobile version of next-gen G92 GPU

NVIDIA has announced a mobile version of its benchmark-busting G92 desktop GPU …

Today NVIDIA launched the GeForce 8800M GTX and GeForce 8800M GTS, two GPUs that do quite a bit to close the next-gen GPU gap between desktops and notebooks by bringing the architecture behind the just-released, top-of-the-benchmark-heap G92 GPU to the portable space. NVIDIA claims that these new GPUs will let you play Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 on your laptops, and the company's press release features a quote from Epic's Mark Rein, who claims that "these next-gen machines run Unreal Tournament 3 fantastically even at HD resolutions of 1920x1200." But at what quality settings, one wonders?

The answer, at least in the case of UT3, is likely to be, "high quality," given the amount of hardware that NVIDIA was able to pack into the mobile GPU using the same 65nm process on which the GeForce 8800GT is made, but just don't expect the game to run at the kinds of 100+ frames-per-second that gamers love to see in benchmark roundups. Take a look at the chart below, which compares the two new mobile GPUs to their 65nm desktop counterparts:

The mobile parts aren't as brawny as their desktop cousins in terms of either hardware or memory bandwidth, but when compared to their other GeForce 8M series siblings (these range from 8 to 32 stream processors) they'll offer performance that's much closer to a desktop gaming experience. And in case you plan to do all of your gaming while tethered to a wall socket, the new parts are also SLI-capable, with support up to 512MB of memory.

Model

G8800M GTS

G8800M GTX

G8800 GT

Core clock

500

500

600

Stream processors

64

96

112

Fillr ate
Billion texels per second

16

24

33.6

Memory bus width
Bits

256

256

256

Memory bandwidth
GBps

51.2

51.2

57.6

NVIDIA says that laptops containing the new GPUs will be available "soon," which could theoretically mean before Christmas but probably means sometime in January.

The fabrication process disparity between GPUs and CPUs has historically made for some problems in breaking GPUs out of their relatively power-insensitive desktop gaming niche, especially when GPU makers try to deliver performance in the same league as a desktop GPU but on a constrained power budget. Witness NVIDIA's May introduction of its GeForce 8M line of mobile GPUs, which were cut-down derivatives of the popular G80 desktop line that featured only a fraction of the latter's stream processing power. Reducing the number of stream processors was necessary in order to get transistor counts down low enough to fit the design into a laptop form factor, absent a process shrink from the G80's positively geriatric 90nm process. Because the new 8800M parts are produced on TSMC's 65nm process, NVIDIA had to cut out much less hardware in order to fit the device into a mobile form factor. This means more features and better performance.